Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

San Francisco protests on a silver platter

I’m all for reducing pollution, but we don’t need a trumped-up excuse like “climate change” in order to achieve a cleaner environment. Minimizing pollution is a legitimate goal which stands on its own merits; concocting hysterical disaster scenarios (such as those shown in An Inconvenient Truth) only serves to undermine any credibility the environmental and conservation movements once had.

That’s Zombie speaking, in the first of a four chapter journey through a day of protests in San Francisco. Zombie covers environmentalists protesting environmentalists, madcaps trying to crash a Tea Party, the Tea Party itself and an SEIU Immigration Amnesty protest. One can say many things about the City (and I often do), but it’s certainly never boring. Find out for yourself. Pull up a comfortable chair in front of your computer, and let Zombie do the walking.

P.S. If you’d like more visuals and some audio of the SF Tea Party, check out Fund 47.

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Check out this story of a new killer fungus. The first paragraph reports, “A potentially deadly strain of fungus is spreading among animals and people in the northwestern United States and the Canadian province of British Columbia, researchers reported on Thursday.” You read through the story for the who, what, where and when and then this curious closing sentence, “Freezing can kill the fungus and climate change may be helping it spread, the researchers said.” Global warming is such a masterful scam because everything, except volcanoes, can be attributed to it. When there’s record rain or drought, cold or heat, melting and growing ice caps and now deadly life threatening fungus, it’s all because of global warming. Everything ill that happens in the world is global warming i.e. cancerous human caused. Link to story below: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N22129903.htm

garyp

What are the odds that economic problems will soon be linked to “climate change.” For example: 1. Food shortages, caused by switching corn production to (more profitable, due to subsidies) biofuels causes food riots in the 3rd world. Instead of explaining the cause-effect of using food to propel cars=> less food and higher prices for the poor, the meme will be that global warming is reducing farmers productivity (without any examination of actual crop production numbers to test that assertion). 2. Poor retail sales will be linked to “unseasonable” temperatures (too hot, too cold, too moderate) caused by global warming (as is all weather, reguardless of the type, and regardless of whether the wonderful “models” predicted the events in question or even have a mechanism to relate the event to increasing CO2 levels). 3. Falling employment could be linked to heavy snows, caused by global warming (no explaination for how that happens, just that global warming causes everything bad). Opps! Already used that one! When you have an “intellectual” class that prides itself on “group think” (as demonstrated in your Rush article) and a outright fear of exposing their cherished, but fragile, worldview to opposing viewpoints or data, the propaganda ministry (that would be NPR, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, major dailies, etc.) is not required to illustrate a scientifically plausible link between an event and its (purported) cause. Simply repeating the mantra (global warming causes all bad events in the environment, four legs good, two legs bad, etc.) is enough. This allows the self-identified “thinking” members of our society to avoid doing the very thing they pride themselves on–critical thinking. They simply repeat the reassuring homilies that they have been taught by the professional manipulators, and their worries (as well as the need to examine issues and search for real solutions) are relieved. For example: 1. Cancer is caused by man-made chemicals, ergo, carrying a sign at a protest to deny a chemical plant a license will prevent me from getting cancer (vice, cancer is a disease, primarily, of aging. Dying young, or modern medicine, made possible by the very industrial society they are protesting, is their only defense against most cancers. 2. An identical chemical compound is bad (if produced by man) or good (if produced by nature). One carbon atom plus two oxygen atoms produced in the combustion of coal will destroy life on our planet. Two oxygen atoms plus one carbon atom produced during combustion of food is a harmless product of the ecosystem. 3. A new fungus (or an old fungus not previously thought to be a problem) affecting a handful of people because ecotourism brings immunologically naive people into contact with pathogens they have never before encountered is now a result of an earth ravaged by industrial society. The fact that industrial society has eliminated (or controlled) most of the pathogens that killed humans in their millions a hundred years ago, is taken for granted, and if mentioned, is proof that you are a enemy of the earth. Sorry to go on so long. However, the number of examples is almost endless so I am actually being quite restrained. In the “Oak and the Calf” Solzhenitsyn discusses how the western “intellectuals” betrayed the suffering people who lived under communism. He seemed especially scornful of their outrage over the legal execution of a convicted murderer versus their silence and unconcern when millions were murdered for seeking peaceful change under a brutal dictatorship. By focusing on imagined (but easily protested) wrongs and ignoring real, but frightening, threats to freedom, they actually were supporting the denial of human rights rather than being their champion (as they imagined). Similarly, environmentalists will only be happy when they have destroyed, in the name of protecting us, the industrial society that has transformed the death of children from a myriad of causes from a morbid certainty (hence the importance of large numbers of children so that some lived to adulthood) to such a such a rarity that when it appears possible entire communities band together to raise money for medical care or research to prevent such an unthinkable tragedy. In the name of returning us to some (imagined) golden age of environmental purity, they are working toward inflicting misery, suffering and death on their fellow man. The single example of the sorry tale of opposition to use of DDT to prevent malaria and the million deaths each year that this facilitates should be enough to convince anyone of their error. However, this is only possible if you are willing to study the issue and abandon the fables propagated by “Silent Spring” and the environmental lobby. You must shed the comforting thought that if we eliminate pesticides we will make everyone happier and healthier, instead of more sickly or dead. Our challenge is not a lack of education, but rather an educational system thats makes unthinking adherance to false memes the main critera for calling yourself “educated.” I have no solution, other than sites like this and commentators like Rush, but I fear that the comforting lies that so many of our family members and friends cling to so tightly, can only be dislodged by a real calamity whose result may be to eliminate the foolish rather than forcing them to open their minds. Modern society, despite its power to improve our lives and protect us from the threats our recent ancestors confronted daily, is actually quite fragile and once disrupted will be difficult to reconstruct. It requires the interlinked functioning of a myriad of systems of communication, power distribution, water distribution, food production and transport, etc. Once significantly damaged, it can only be rebuilt with significant outside assistance. What if it is disrupted on a worldwide basis and no large area is left untouched to help rebuild? How is that possible? How could a scientific/industrial society that has transformed the lives of most of humanity be crippled by the misplaced hatred of most of its most influential members? One possible scenario is if an nature event of worldwide impact (huge volanic eruption) is met, not by a concerted effort by leaders and influential thinkers to maintain our society, but with an attitude that we somehow “deserve” this punishment for our poor stewardship of the earth and we should not struggle to overcome this challenge but should rather accept our fate. Very quickly, a relatively minor decrease in food production, could become, not a stimulus to innovate and develop new food supplies but passivity, leading to food shortages, that lead to civil unreast, widespread rioting, collapse of central authority and societal disintegration (neglecting the effect of warring states attempting to control remaining food). Once a people, influenced by its opinion makers, decide that a society is not worth supporting (and, yes, fighting for) it will succumb to seemingly minor challenges because it cannot muster any support to sustain itself. Rome’s walls did not fall, its people could not and would not man them against invaders. Can that happen to us. I think we are watching it happen today. Only the final catalyst for our collapse has yet to occur.

suek

Wow … garyp…you’re certainly a ray of sunshine!

Is that a summary of the “World according to garyp”??

(Note that I didn’t say you were wrong…!)

garyp

suek,

Sorry, if I sound the alarm with no (ready) solutions.

I have spent my life in two endevours:
1) trying to improve the quality of patient care through process improvement (i.e. essentially to prevent human error by enforcing a disciplined approach to layered independent review and self checks)
2) to educating professionals and workers in technical (usually medical) fields in the scientific method and how the equipment and technology they use every day actually works.

Both efforts have shown me how resistant humans are to let go of the myths that make their life more comfortable and easier.

1. The belief that “good” professionals, technicians, etc. don’t make mistakes and therefore, don’t need to be on guard against mistakes is impossible to eradicate. (The corrollary is that “I” am a “good” whatever is intricately linked to the first statement).

2. The belief that “I care about my patients” is not inconsistent with my refusal to make the effort to provide oversight of my peers or accept their oversight to prevent treatment errors is another perennial favorite of most of the human race.

3. The belief that if I know enough about my profession to answer the superficial and often irrelevent questions posed by the (many times) superannuated people that teach (usually without the benefit of having successfully functioned) in that profession, then I am fully qualified.

If a significant fraction of the people in the caring professions cannot bring themselves to work hard enough to really learn their professions and then maintain the discipline to practice them at the highest standard they are capable of it is not suprising that so many Americans are seduced by the simple, easy answers to complex, hard questions in their economic, political and personal life.

This is the source of my essential pessimism. I have done some good in my life but my failures overshadow my successes (at least in my own mind). I guess you could say that this is the world according to GaryP.

suek

I _do_ understand – I think. Maybe not the specifics, but when I hear our lawmakers discussing the present economic situation, I’m overwhelmed by the economic ignorance I hear…and I’m an economic ignoramus myself!

Part of the problem is one I experienced as a school board member – you’re expected to make decisions concerning matters with which you have no experience. Since you _have_ no experience in the matter, it’s pretty difficult to find a source you can depend on to advise you – because you don’t know enough to evaluate how much your source really knows. Often, the result is that the person you count on is the one who is most certain about the topic – and unfortunately, very often the person most certain about a topic is one who actually doesn’t know enough to know what they don’t know.

The situation you seem to be describing is a bit different – you’re dealing with the ones we would be likely to go to – the ones who are most certain about their topic. They _KNOW_. And since they _KNOW_, they are unwilling to consider any possibility that conflicts with what they _KNOW_. Even more so, they’re unwilling to consider the possibility that they might have to change their opinions.

Here’s a link – if you have time – to an interesting post…http://www.plumbbobblog.com/?p=7401
The question he raises is whether this man is likely to attain salvation – because that’s the focus of his blog. That’s not the issue I’d like to focus on – for me, the issue is that this is the story about a man who was certain of a particular “known” fact for virtually all of his life, but when presented with certain other facts, makes the decision that what he has _known_ for all of his life cannot be a fact. He dedicated his life to his known fact – but he gave it up because he considered new information proved that what he knew was not as he thought it was. What an amazing man he was…and how few of them there seem to be!!

Which is what I _think_ you’re saying…!

Danny Lemieux

When you think about it, we really haven’t evolved much beyond the Pagan era and Middle Ages, when natural phenomena were blamed on evil spirits, vague miasmas and the displeasures of earth gods hat could only be propitiated by sacrifices.
As Judeo-Christianity gives ground to the religions of Islam, Secular Humanism and Gaia Science, it will only get weirder and weirder with inevitable horrific consequences.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com/ Ymarsakar

Don’t worry, Danny. If you pay a 1,000 dollars, I’m sure we can put in a good word for you with Those that Count.

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